Some time ago I spoke to a technology recruiter who told me he wouldn’t dare proposing anyone over 40 to his clients.

The recruiter in question was well past this particular age and shamefaced, but he said clients just don’t want to see older faces waiting outside the interview room.

Information technology companies and users appear to be among the worst offenders for this, closely followed by public relations, media and telecom companies. However in some ways they are just more honest and upfront about their prejudices. Age discrimination is not restricted to these industries, you’ll find it just about everywhere, I know of one person applying to work in a department store being turned down for being too old. She was in her 40s.

Before going any further, I should disclose that I personally passed the big five-zero barrier a few months ago. I’m not complaining about my circumstances, as far as I know, most editors don’t care much about the age of their freelance journalists – in my business other factors matter.

However, I am concerned about the feedback I get from people of a similar age who read my writing on the subject.

It’s worth putting this invisible age barrier into some kind of meaningful context. People my age are not old. While those of us who have just passed 50 might have been alive in the 1960s and probably can hum more than a dozen Beatles tunes, I didn’t come of age until after the Sex Pistols and the Clash appeared on the scene. One of my first printed stories was an interview with The Stranglers.

Admittedly my early years in journalism were spent hammering on a manual typewriter, but my first paying job was on an already established personal computer magazine. And yes, it is true that the last time I looked at a line of programming code, it was written in Pascal.

On the other hand, I should point out I’m a good four years younger than Bill Gates – does anyone out there regard him as over the hill?

Maybe they do. After all, he has retired. And the people recruiting staff for Microsoft probably would almost certainly regard Mr Gates as too old for employment.

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When I interviewed him for my Sydney Morning Herald story on the problems facing older knowledge workers, employment consultant and author of “Personal Job Hunting” Denis Baker told me he had seen a number of 50-plus executives find employment in recent years. He says that while people often do get knocked back simply because of their age, many older executives often take such a negative approach to finding a job that they damage their own prospects.

“I’ve seen people who have gone to job interviews and started out on the defensive. They apologise for their age rather than talk about the positives they have to offer. And they do have a lot to offer. Older people don’t just have technical work skills; they’ve usually picked up a lot of life skills along the way that translate well to the workplace.”

Baker says older job seeks should prepare personal skill inventories rather than list work experience. They should also be prepared to list those skills they acquired outside the workforce. “Employers are often looking for initiative, so think of ways you can show this quality.”

One other important factor is to demonstrate an ability to listen and learn. Baker says younger managers might be wary of hiring older executives who constantly tell them how things should be done, on the other hand if the candidate shows willing and can diplomatically pass on expertise, that’s a big plus.

Remember:

1. Don’t apologise about being old.
2. Prepare a list of all the technical work skills you’ve accumulated over the years.
3. Create a similar inventory of your life skills showing what else you can bring to the workplace.
4. Show that while you may be an old dog, you can still learn new tricks.

This post is a follow up to:

Grey-haired knowledge workers get the short straw

and

Is experience really all it’s cracked up to be?

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Fear of litigation makes it difficult for employers to openly turn down job applicants because of their age. Yet there is a strong suspicion the practice is widespread, especially when it comes to filling executive positions.

Some years ago I interviewed Trevor Moir for the Sydney Morning Herald. Moir, an accountant by profession, runs the Executives’ Co-ordination Group, a Sydney-based organisation for older, unemployed executives. He says many of his organisation’s members have been turned down for jobs, or more often, not even considered for work, simply because they are past some unwritten sell-by date.

When I spoke to Moir in the early 2000s, his group had 51 active members, mainly from Sydney’s North Shore. The membership included accountants, bankers, lawyers, engineers, marketing and advertising executives, airline industry workers and IT specialists. In addition to these people, Moir received a constant stream of mail and phone calls from similarly unemployed executives around the country.

He said, “Some of our guys have written hundreds of application letters but have never even received a reply.” Moir had similar experiences himself before he formed the group. According to Moir, recruitment firms are the biggest barrier to employment for older executives. “They’re the first line in the battle. If you actually get past them and speak to an employer, you have a fighting chance.”

At times the experiences of Moir’s member were positively surreal. For example, during a meeting with a recruitment consultant, one member was told he should dye his greying hair before attending an interview.

Which prompts a question; just how old is too old? According to Moir the age where serious discrimination kicks in has dropped considerably in recent years. He certainly had group members who are in their early 40s.

It can get worse. Employment consultant Denis Baker told me he personally saw an extreme case where someone who was 30 was told he was too old for a job. On the other hand, he says he has seen an American study which argued that the most viable workers were people between 55 and 65. The researchers found this group is highly focused – mainly because they know they have one last chance to make money before retirement. They tend to work hard, have better skills and take less sick leave.

The good news for older executives is that demographics mean age discrimination is unsustainable in the long term. In most of the world’s rich countries they workforce is aging so fast that soon employers won’t have the luxury of turning down skilled, experienced workers.

According to research by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 1998 only three percent of the workforce was aged between 60 and 65, by 2016 that age group will account for 15 percent of the workforce. By then more than half the entire workforce will be over 45.

Although discrimination against older workers is commonplace around the world, it does appear to be more entrenched here. Only 49 percent of Australians aged between 55 and 64 are in the workforce, this compares with 59 percent of American workers in the same age group, 60 percent of New Zealanders and up to 65 percent in some parts of Scandinavia. What’s more, Australia is one of the few advanced economies where there is no formal age discrimination legislation, though this is set to change in the near future.

See also: Is experience really all it’s cracked up to be?

Image via Wikipedia

Writing in the US edition of ComputerWorld Paul Glen argues that despite what the recruitment advertisements say, employers may not be looking for experience. He says;

…if experience is at such a premium, why are there so many articles about how hard it is for older IT workers to find a job?

Glen goes on to say, “most people don’t really absorb the lessons that their experience offers. In one sense, they haven’t so much gained experience as they have had things happen to them. They become neither knowledgeable nor jaded. They haven’t processed the ideas or compared real-world happenings with their theories of how the world works. Without this processing, experience isn’t really a great teacher or a cruel one; it’s only a way to mark the passage of time.”

Maybe it’s like that for information technology specialists. In my industry, publishing, experience tends to mean that when things happen, you quickly learn the best techniques for dealing with them. Better still, accumlated experience usually means you’ve got the mental tools to deal with situations not previously encountered.

Of course, being a journalist or an editor working on daily or weekly tight deadlines and quick turn-around news stories is vastly different from being an IT specialist. So I could be out of line here when I suggest that experience makes many aspects of work so much easier that they fade into the background leaving plenty of brainpower and energy left-over to deal with the bigger issues. There may not be a perfect correlation between experience and knowledge or wisdom, but there’s certainly some kind of link.

via Experience: Is it really all it’s cracked up to be?